t h e d e e p

12th July 2013

Baltasar Kormákur

The Sea. And a Large Man

95 Minutes

12A

Si

10th July 2013

UK Release

Director

Starring

Runtime

Certificate

Reviewer

Reviewed

Feats of survival are always impressive.
Especially to those of us that count a feat of survival as anything worse than
minor delays on the Northern Line. One way or another though they tend to make
heroes out of the survivor. This is very definitely not the case with The Deep.

The movie tells the not so fishy (based on a true) tale of
trawlerman Gulli who, ditched in the drink when his captain’s boat snags a net
on some rocks, somehow manages to survive for six hours, swimming three miles
in the pitch dark and then traversing some of the most painful terrain in the
world barefoot. He is then feted by the scientific community as, were it not
for locating the wreck, they wouldn't believe he survived that long. Normally
people are expected to last around twenty minutes in water that is barely above
freezing.

Ólafur Darri Ólafsson is the man tasked
with portraying this amazing man and I think it may be a failing in the film
that he portrays him so accurately. You see, Gulli is the very opposite of a
leading man. Introverted, stolid, reliable and softly spoken, he’s instantly
likable but not exactly brimming with personality. From the brief clips at the
end of the movie of the man himself being interviewed, I’d say that Ólafsson
does a magnificent job of portraying him.

The film excels at demonstrating the utter
insignificance of one man in the North Atlantic and the fragility of life in
such conditions. Gulli’s crew mates last fleeting moments once on the water and
it really does demonstrate how spectacularly unlikely his survival was. At one
point, the camera pans back from Gulli swimming seemingly to nowhere and we get
a view of a dot of a man utterly surrounded by angry black sea. Even when he reaches
land, he’s not dragging himself gratefully up on to a beach, Gulli is slammed
into lethal volcanic rocks as he tries desperately to extricate himself from
the unforgiving sea. Once on land, he is faced with miles of solidified lava
which he must cross barefoot. If you’ve ever set foot on a lava field, you’ll
appreciate just how agonizing this must have been.

Once back in the village though, the film
struggles to find direction. It’s strongest when it is portraying Gulli
struggling to come to terms with his survival but I don’t think it really spends enough time on
this. It’s heartwarming to see him sat at the kitchen table with his milk in a
glass (a desperate promise to the almighty seagull that followed him while he was swimming) but I wanted to see more of him dealing with these kinds of things. Once he
is whisked off to the various scientific tests you realize that you’re not
going to get to know him any more than you do already. He is such a closed
book, despite the old cine-film style flashbacks to his stolid attitude as a
youngster.

The movie commendably steers clear of
sentimentality, Gulli’s lot is no different at the end of the film than it was
at the start. In fact, we close with him heading back out to sea once more. I
enjoyed The Deep, it’s portrayal of
the utter brutality of nature is awesome and as mentioned above, the central
performance is spot on. But it struggles to get you to engage with the central
character and I came out feeling disappointed that I didn’t get to know Gulli
better.